Language Arts -- Incorporating Technology

How do you as a Language Arts/English teacher incorporate technology into your classroom? I try to use a different technology for each unit to allow students to "play" and grow. I have used Inspiration, ComicLife, PowerPoint..etc.

What do you use? What are some fun projects you have created for your students?

Jenn

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Permalink Reply by Katie Pitner on June 8, 2011 at 12:05pm

Hi Jennifer! I teach 7/8 Language Arts and am currently getting my masters in technology integration. I have found many new technologies that work well in the English class.

I take the basic concept of literature circles, and provide the class with a wiki page to respond. pbworks is a great, free wiki space. You just sign up for one, and add pages for each book title. The students then access the wiki and respond to any questions you have laid out for them, or it can be their own "conversation." I love this because I can quickly and efficiently check up on each of them, making sure they are participating, and answer any questions they have.

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Permalink Reply by Mathew Needleman on June 8, 2011 at 10:34pm

Comicbook is a good one.

For myself, I've found blogging to be successful in giving students an authentic audience for their writing. However, my favorite technology has been moviemaking for students as a means of increasing fluency and writing ability.

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Permalink Reply by Mark Fuson on June 9, 2011 at 8:32am

I use Prezi, MovieMaker, GoAnimate, and Animoto, among many others. I think the key to using all technology is to have the project not only be interesting to the students, but also have it accomplish a number of the standards or objectives of your curriculum. We should never trade out pure fur for lack of content.

That being said, there always seems to be a way to address your standards in English using technology. I teach high schoolers, so my projects might not be up your alley. My students last year did the following: they used timetoast to create timelines for the Trojan war (example), and Moviemaker to create Romeo and Juliet rewrites (example), and created videos to display their understanding of the literary concepts they learned this year. Over the summer, they are creating movie trailers for the local libraries child selections as well. Of course, we did group writing and editing using GoogleDocs and TitanPad as well. They also completed mythology podcasts to teach one another about the various Greek gods.

Hopefully, this helps you out a little. Sounds like you have a pretty good start, though!

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Permalink Reply by Matt Keillor on June 9, 2011 at 9:17am

Hi Jennifer,

Tech4Learning has some great software to integrate technology into the Language Arts curriculum. For high school level, Frames www.tech4learning.com/frames and Share www.tech4learning.com/share are options for students to showcase their knowledge by creating presentations, videos, podcasts and websites. An example of a student project using Frames can be found here:

http://connect.tech4learning.com/video/aew-kk-2009-andy-warhol

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Permalink Reply by Cathy Herstead on June 9, 2011 at 9:42pm

I have the students create power points. I allowed them to create comic strips instead of giving a traditional speech. I had one comic creation site that the students could use, but one of the girls found a better one. I also tried to help them find a site to make an interactive poster. We found an "okay" site. I also used wallwisher for studnets to make blogs after reading assignments in novels. That worked okay, but the students were limited on the length of what they could write by the site itself. I hope to learn how to make my own site to eliminate this problem.